How to Turn off Read Receipts in iMessage on iPhone

The read receipt in iMessage tells you when (and if) someone has read the iMessage you sent them. It’s useful. But, it’s also a privacy issue because if you don’t want the other person to know that you read their message, this feature is going to play havoc in that plan. Also, the read receipt is pretty misleading. If you just open and close without reading the iMessage, the read receipt is still sent. Which means, even without you having read the iMessage, the sender thinks that you’ve read it.

How to turn-off iMessage read receipts so all you see in its place is just “Delivered”

Open Settings

Scroll down and tap on Messages

Now, turn off Send Read Receipts

That’s it. It’s that simple. By turning off read receipts, you’ll turn off the ability of other people to know that you’ve read an iMessage sent to you.

When you turn this off, instead of ‘Read at …’ the sender only sees ‘Delivered’ as shown below. Which is okay because this doesn’t really convey that you’ve read the iMessage, just that it has been delivered successfully. (Or sent, in common terms).

Turning off Read Receipts can be a problem at times. When you’re chatting with someone over iMessage, even when you’ve got the read receipts turned off, the recipient can know that you’re using iMessage when you are typing a message to the recipient.

What I’m saying is, your friend will know through the typing ellipsis (…) that you have read the message. But when the read receipt isn’t delivered, doubts might be triggered.

The best way to go underground, then, is to turn off the typing indicator (…). To do this, you’ll need to install a tweak. You can read about that here.